Optiver becomes first Gold Sponsor of C++ on Sea

We're thrilled to announce that Optiver have joined us as our first Gold Sponsors. You'll have a chance to meet and chat with them at the conference as they will have a stand there.

Optiver is one of the largest electronic market makers in the world, trading a wide range of finacial products on over 50 exchanges. Their infrastructure is a web of distributed sysrems spanning the globe.

They're using C++ for their most crucial applications, with a focus on high-performance and low-latency. If that sounds interesting they are constantly looking for top C++ talent to join them in their headquarters in the exciting city of Amsterdam.

If you're not already based there it's a really great place to try if you're open to relocating

Workshop instructors announced

Exciting news! Our workshop instructors have been selected and have all confirmed that they'll go ahead. We'll post full details in the next week or two, but for now here are the headlines:

• Nicolai Josuttis will present, "Modern C++ Template Programming"
• Jason Turner with, "Applied constexpr"
• Jon Jagger and Kevlin Henney, "A Day of Deliberate Practice"
• David Gross, "Low-latency C++ workshop"

We've added separate tickets for each of these workshops, so you can sign up for them now. If you already bought the generic "one day workshop" (which we've now retired), we'll be in touch to get you transferred to one of these more specific tickets types.

The main conference speakers are almost selected. There has been a slight delay but notifications should go out within the next week and an announcement will be made early in October.

Free Ticket Winner

Thanks to everyone who entered our free ticket draw by tweeting about the conference and the competition. It helps us spread the word, and also gives an opportunity to someone that may not otherwise be able to attend to get a ticket.

We had 60 entries, with some really great thoughts about what they would hope for in the conference. In the end we had to pick one winner. We wanted to make sure it was fair and completely random. So here is my highly scientific process:

First I went to Twitter to view all the liked tweets from the conference account. I then copied them into a text file. I did a regex search over that for ^@.* to filter out all the twitter names and put them into their own file. I then used Sublime Text's "Permute Lines | Shuffle" feature to randomise the ordering. Sublime shows the line numbers so I needed a number between 1 and 60. So I went to another room and asked my 11 year-old daughter to pick a random number between 1 and 60 and she chose 47.

So who's Twitter name was at position 47 in my list? Would you believe it?

So Kate Gregory, one of our keynote speakers, by a fair draw (as fair as the above process can be), won our free ticket competition! Of course Kate doesn't need a free ticket for herself, but as her tweet suggests, she can pass it on to whoever she choses, and I trust Kate to do so judiciously - so I think this worked out well! I'll be in touch with Kate to organise the details.

Congratulations Kate - and thanks again to everyone that took part. Hope to still see at least some of you at conference in February.